Being governed by self is like trying to drive with the handbrake on. It's possible, with great exertion, to override the handbrake and force the vehicle along the road, but the movement will be slow, and it will make a terrific noise.
The secondary problems—the slow and effortful movement, the grinding noise—are then treated as the primary problems; ambitions are lowered to accommodate the slowness of the movement, and decorative sounds are added over the top to drown out the din. Tertiary problems arise: the welter of feelings, the sense of inadequacy and embarrassment, even shame, at the manifest failure of life to date. Sometimes it is only these tertiary problems that are evident, and it is these that become the subject matter of discourse and treatment. We are now two stages away from the actual problem, and endlessly circle in an abstract, cloudy world of feelings about thoughts and thoughts about feelings. A quaternary problem arises: the sense of inadequacy, embarrassment, and shame about the feelings themselves. To be fair, this inadequacy, embarrassment, and shame is quite right: the feelings are a sign that something has gone very wrong in how I am living and are a fire alarm, a clarion call to arms. It is precisely at this point that one's future hangs in the balance: Will I unpick the problem back to its source or plough on, regardless, hoping to turn evil into good, to push through to the other side, where stability, utility, happiness, and the Greater Good await me?
A website writes: To honour your emotions, you must give yourself permission to feel what you're feeling. Doing so allows you to move through your emotions in ways that can serve you, your relationships, and your life. Another website writes: The truth is, our feelings aren’t as scary as we think they are. They give us messages about what we really want and what is important to us which usually just leads to living a happier, more fulfilling life.
There is some degree of sense here. It's quite right that the fact that one is feeling something should be identified, acknowledged, and faced, and the feeling should indeed be felt, not denied. It's also true that feelings provide signals about 'what we really want and what is important to us'. The sense intended in the articles in question, however, is that what we want is right to want, what is important to us is rightfully important to us; the feelings are a sign that we have been thwarted; only by identifying these wants, these values, can we pursuit their satisfaction and their embodiment, respectively, through self-assertion and through condemnation and command of and negotiation with others. It is presupposed that anything wanted is good by virtue of being wanted, and anything important is indeed important by virtue of being considered so. It is at this point that the monster reveals its true face. It should be self-evident from a cursory survey of the world that what people want and value is sometimes good and valuable and sometimes bad and valueless.
The quaternary feelings, the feeling bad about feeling bad, the divine discontentment, should be a sign to undo, to reject, to question, to discard; the acid should burn all the way through to the bone; ironically, to pour base onto the acid to neutralise it, to lovingly accept such feelings, is precisely to deny their utility in indicating where my values are misplaced, where my wants are unrealistic, unreasonable, immoral, vapid, or whatever else characterises their wrongness. Recognising the value of feelings means critically evaluating the values they point to, not taking their whine at face value and rubber-stamping whatever is occasioning the distress.
C. S. Lewis:
I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A wrong sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot ‘develop’ into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, ‘with backward mutters of dissevering power’—or else not.
The fly in the ointment is lurking on its surface: in ways that can serve you, your relationships, and your life. This is the prime cause, the first turnoff from the highway, the glitch in the programming.
St Augustine Prayer Book:
Pride is putting self in the place of God as the centre and objective of our life, or of some department thereof. It is the refusal to recognise our status as creatures, dependent on God for our existence, and placed by Him in a specific relationship to the rest of His creation.
The pain of this, dare I say, original sin, the first turning away from God and the first setting up camp outside the Eternal City in defiant opposition to Home, should, with the requisite work, result in a return Home, not in an insistence that one's flag be saluted, that the boundaries of one's tinpot kingdom be respected, that the neighbouring plots in the extramural shantytown of self behave themselves appropriately, in other words in a manner that least aggravates and most benefits me.
To return to the handbrake question: once the handbrake is taken off, once self is deactivated, and the person is reoriented towards God, the problem of the slow, bumpy, juddering driving, the problem of the terrible noise, the inadequacy, embarrassment, and shame about these things, and the inadequacy, embarrassment, and shame about these very feelings vanish like hoar frost on a late April morning.